I had too busy a schedule and was not planning to watch television when the Gujarat election results were supposed to be declared. But my colleagues insisted that I must watch at least some news channel, even if just for entertainment! So I sat in front of the TV; and while surfing channels, I saw a lot of important journalists and analysts on Times Now and decided to stay there for a while.

Honestly, I could not but help a Bangla expletive escape my mouth when I heard what some experts were saying. One was saying that Narendra Modi and his electoral victory was against the Constitution of India. Another was saying how the Gujarat verdict goes against the spirit of India and how the Idea of India is in danger. I always thought free and fair elections were a celebration of the Constitution, democracy and the Idea of India. So what was all this nonsense talk all about? The more I watched and the more I followed analysts in other news channels, I realized something simple: these individuals were very unhappy that Modi had won and they clearly would have preferred his loss. I also realized they hate him in a very irrational manner. For example, one person went on and on about how Modi is bad because he encourages a personality cult that revolves around Modi. Interestingly, nobody in that particular news panel found time to mention how more than 60 welfare schemes of the government are named after the Gandhi family. If that is not personality cult, what is? Someone else in some channel said that Modi is dictatorial and doesn’t allow any leader or voice to prosper under him. Then I thought, what is Congress if not dictatorial? Can any chief minister of any Congress-ruled state defy the central leadership the way Modi has repeatedly done? What will be the Congress minister’s fate if that happens? For that matter, I honestly think that at least some of the young Congress leaders – ranging from Sachin Pilot to Jyotiraditya Scindia to Milind Deora and some others – are better equipped to handle India than Rahul Gandhi. But not a single panelist in any TV channel was saying any of this.

So let us sum up something: the first thing is that most English media types absolutely hate Narendra Modi. That is all right. Even journalists have every right to hate someone. But I wondered how Modi’s victory could destroy India, the way so many senior journalists were complaining. So I asked my colleagues to note down the reasons why the English journalists hate Modi. The results were interesting. The first reason was that Modi is anti-Muslim and communal. The related reason was that Modi has apparently never apologized for the 2002 riots. The second reason was that he is interested only in projecting himself. The third reason was that he is supposedly a dictator and a fascist. And the fourth reason was that his claims of a developed Gujarat are, the journalists claim, hollow. Read more....

Massive scams, election booth rigging through muscle power, murders in broad daylight and rapes of women on streets, in complete disregard of law and almost daring it... each of these is possible continuously and blatantly only due to one reason – the paralyzed judiciary of our country. It’s not the dearth of law but the dearth of the hand of law reaching the criminal, goon, politician, scamster and rapist. Who is scared of the law of the land? Not any of them. It’s the simple man – whose daughter is being raped and money being eaten away by corrupt politicians and other scamsters – who is afraid of the law and lives under an illusion that law exists in this country... till his daughter is shot dead in public and he dies running from pillar to post being squashed under the mesh of dates that have kept the judiciary in India dysfunctional and paralyzed. The average case takes about two decades to be solved and the person fighting for his rights is killed by our judicial system in any case unless he dies in reality as well.

As a media house, from the very beginning, we have been extremely vocal about the Indian judiciary – and that’s why we have also started our bimonthly supplement of Governance Watch with a special focus on the judiciary. We strongly believe that a poor justice delivery mechanism has been the root cause of most of our problems. It goes without saying that India has a weak, or rather a limping justice delivery system, which makes sure that justice is denied in most cases; and even if delivered, it does not hold any value, thanks to the time (read lifetime) it takes to be delivered. By the Centre’s own admission, there is a staggering number of nearly three crore court cases pending at several stages in different courts of India. This situation is a deliberate creation of our successive governments. But if criminals were to be punished, how would they be able to rule? Thus, to make the rule of criminals, the corrupt and the rapists of all other varieties easy, the governments in India over the years have deliberately kept the judicial system in our country dysfunctional.

This serves the purpose of the legal fraternity as well. Thanks to the years or decades that it takes to execute a case and to take it to its culmination, the legal fraternity invariably ends up making a windfall profit. And as I just said, thanks to the absence of a time-bound justice delivery mechanism, making moolah is not at all a challenge for our legal fraternity, as they are quite adept at purposefully making cases hang on for years. The only thing that we nowadays talk about is corruption. And the one and only solution for solving this issue of corruption as well as one that reduces all kinds of crime by a massive extent, is a functional judicial system. Criminals, rapists, greedy and corrupt people are globally prevalent; yet, they touch far lesser lives in USA than in India simply because the American judicial system is functional, while ours is dysfunctional. In America, they have ten times more judges per million people than in India; so there is a fear of immediate punishment – while in India, there is no such fear of punishment. Read more....

Come Diwali, the greatest Indian celebration, and a considerable number of people all over the country get burns and many die of burn-related injuries. One doesn’t realise the gravity of the situation till tragedy strikes at one’s doorstep. This Diwali, a small diya kept near a staircase, in twenty seconds straight, had my aunt (my brother-in-law and fellow TSI columnist Prashanto Bannerjee’s mother) in its deadly wrap. She, being a neighbour since my childhood, is perhaps closer to me than are any of my real aunts. Despite her saree being made of cotton, and despite my brother-in-law noticing the burning saree instantly and putting off the flames with buckets of water within twenty seconds, she got 65% burns – and at 72 years of age, that is dangerous... very dangerous! When we reached Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi – where we finally admitted her – the doctor told us that if she had been of Prashanto’s age, 36, he would have given her only a 20% chance of survival with the 3rd degree burns that she had. But then, there’s a small background story to all this. Prashanto’s mother was actually taken initially to Max Super Speciality Hospital. To our surprise, we were told by Max doctors to get her admitted somewhere else since they didn’t treat burn injuries… The quick research we did after our visit to Max gave us a shocking statistic. In Delhi, the capital of India, there are only two hospitals capable of treating burn injuries. Other hospitals in fact don’t even admit burn victims! And being Diwali, Safdarjung Hospital, the only hospital other than Apollo for burn victims, was expected to be very crowded. If Delhi has only two, then you can imagine how many hospitals does the average Indian city have that handle burn injuries – none!

Anyway, once she was admitted to the ICU at Apollo and we got talking to the doctor, and wondered how in such a big city such few beds were available for burn victims, his answer shocked us further. He said that a burn injury is a poor man’s injury and ergo didn’t have many hospitals as takers. Before this incident, it had never struck me that this was the case. It should have been quite obvious actually: it is the poor woman – and not really the man – who gets burnt when her saree catches fire from the kitchen stove kept on the floor. And when such poor women get burnt, it matters less whether they survive or not. Therefore, no hospital has been interested in investing in a burn injury center! What was sadder was that when I researched on the net and read about the tremendous advancement of medicines for burn injuries (that have reduced chances of mortality to negligible even in severe burn cases), I realized that we still lived in a country that, despite the spectacular international medical advancements, continues to have the highest number of people dying of completely curable burns. Read more....

Just a couple of months back, the entire global media fraternity was talking about the next probable war between China and Japan over the issue of a small group of islands in the East China Sea. Just when people thought that the issue was cooling down, last month, a delegation of former US officials submitted a report to Hillary Clinton that the dispute could spin out of control and result into a military confrontation; add to that China’s recently declared intentions to deploy marine surveillance drones to track maritime activity around the cluster of islands from where the conflict originated. The entire issue is certainly far from over, with both the nations in no mood to step back. There is, of course, nothing new in the conflict between Japan and China. Through centuries, these two Asian neighbours have been brutal to each other – politically, economically and militarily. The Japanese monarchy before World War II was notable for their imperialistic intentions – they invaded China in 1931 to mark the beginning of a violent, 14-year occupation of the land, finally retreating only after the World War II reversals in 1945. However, in the post-World War geopolitics, the foreign policy trajectory between the two nations has swapped its direction. Since the past few decades, Japan has sought to maintain a nice-guy image, while on the other hand, China has wanted to treat Japan slightingly. Japan’s cooperative and accommodative foreign policy acted as a silver bullet for its economy, which saw an unprecedented growth from 1950s till 1980s. That period saw Japan barging into the elite club of developed nations (the only Asian country to accomplish the feat then) and becoming a part of G-7, or the seven most industrialized states in the world. That’s a remarkable accomplishment, considering the fact that this was the same country that had literally been reduced to ruins in the Second World War and also the fact that none of its Asian counterparts could mirror Japan’s subsequent economic achievements. China, like Japan, started a new journey from 1949, when the Mao Tse Tung-led Communist Party of China overran the country and gained control on its governance. But unlike Japan, China, in the first three decades, emphasized largely on a military buildup. Amidst this journey of these two Asian giants, one thing represented permanency – that these two nations won’t walk hand in hand. Interestingly, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party had promised before the 2009 election that Japan would be more muscular in its foreign policy and had hinted then on a shift from being a US-backed nation to being one with a more Far East integration, including with China. However, that didn’t happen. The recent happenings have in fact worsened the situation. The first, significant barrage came from the Japanese government in early September 2012, when they revealed their intentions to purchase three disputed islands in East China Sea – a move that led to their fragile relationship with China nose-diving in no time. China pledged to thwart Japan’s intentions, and in response, sent three fishery surveillance ships to the territorial waters near Senkaku, the group of islands in contention. In return, Japan adopted an aggressive foreign policy stance and announced that they would take the Chinese bull by the horn – by mid September, Japan had officially bought the islands. Read more....